When the white rain ran with the red-lit rain and Perdido Street doors stood wide. Where here and there, between dance hall and dive, some nightingale stood with the weight of her shame so fresh upon her that she couldn’t as yet invite someone even though she hadn’t that day bitten food.
(Nobody knew where these silent girls came from. Nor whether their eyes, searching inward, saw a disheveled and bloodstained bed or a new cash register. Whether they were eaten alive by regret as they stood or merely counted in indifference to everything: one dollar, two dollars, three and four, when I get eight I’ll get me a dress of tropical pink. When I get twenty-two I’ll get pink slippers too.)
Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves.
Some were feebs and some were loonies, some were tattoed girls. There were peep shows and side shows, fat girls and gawks and a dwarf who called herself the Princess.
There weren’t enough keepers to handle the stock. Panders who had never had more than two women tapping, found themselves without enough windows to go around. Five or six all yammering at once for her turn at door or pane, vying with one another to be top broad for daddy.
It was a daddy’s market, but daddy had to take care all the same.
Oliver Finnerty, ex-exercise boy and currently proprietor of six peepholes on the second floor of Spider-Boy Court, once having incurred a debt of ninety days to the parish jail, had turned over a girl to a friend in the trade for safekeeping. Oliver had expended a great deal of time and thought on this child, for he’d seen her promise early. He had told her, ‘Baby you go with this man, and when he says, “Walk pretty,” you walk pretty all the way.’ And to the friend: ‘Don’t whip her where it’ll leave her marked, or she’ll use it as an excuse for laying off work. Now good luck and God bless the both of you.’
Ninety days later, his debt paid in full, Finnerty had returned to reclaim his property only to find her wearing a long black dress and a pince-nez, and his colleague out digging ditches. Something had gone wrong. Finnerty had had to spend that whole day talking the girl back into her lounging pajamas. By the time the friend returned from work, a black lunch bucket under his arm, Finnerty’s patience had been exhausted.
‘Just look what you done to his girl,’ he berated the Benedict Arnold of Panderdom. ‘You took a nice sweet kid and twisted her all up. You undone all my good work.’ Then he raised the girl’s hair off her neck and began cracking her patiently, without hatred or heat, but mechanically, with contentment in a job he was the right man for. And like a good little whore she stood and took it, for she knew very well she had it coming. And that, once done, she had a chance for full pardon.
But Benedict Arnold would never be pardoned: when this sort of thing happened it wasn’t the girl’s fault. Now he could only sit mute and miserable, knowing he’d never be allowed to drink among honest pimps again. But would instead drink in crumb-dump taverns where working men play dominoes for nickels and envy those who get to work on Saturday too. Oh, if only Oliver would give him one more chance!
Oliver wouldn’t violate his principles. When the whipping was done, the pince-nez crushed and the long black dress in the garbage can, he turned to his ex-colleague and finished him crisply. ‘You. Pick up your lunch bucket and get back in your ditch.’
Dishonored, disbarred, a disgrace to right-thinking procurors, the Man-Who-Would-Be-A-Pander shuffled wearily, without a word of goodbye, out onto a street that other lunch buckets had laid long ago.
And was never seen in respectable circles again.
Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast.
‘Aching Chopper’s giving me trouble again,’ he would complain of the girl who had been with him longest, the moon-faced Chicago blonde. ‘I know she been faithful as a broad can be but her teeth give me trouble. It’s a new plate now near every month. I’m supporting half the dentists in town.’
‘If you’d stop busting her in the mouth you wouldn’t have to support that many,’ the mulatto woman once called Lucille suggested.
Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy.
He’d crowd all five into the single motor, deposit one on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, two near Hammond (where a fast track was operating at the time) and take the other two to Gulfport. To the women he pretended that his motive was to save time, but to his brothel brothers he readily admitted that the idea was really to save listening to all that yakking – ‘I can’t bear to be with one broad a whole half day, not to mention five.’
He had the identical weakness, as a pilot, that he had had as an apprentice jockey. He’d get so high on Panama pot that he couldn’t make up his mind. On a horse he had never known whether to go for the whip or tighten rein so that sometimes he had done both at once. In a plane, with five silly women high as himself and every one giving him orders, he wouldn’t be able to decide whether to land on roadway or grass. The road burned up the plane’s tires so badly it would mean a new set – but the risk of flipping over on the grass, inviting loss of his working principal, was even greater.
The second the women saw that Daddy was in the switches, they fought to be first to help. One would decide for the roadway and grab for the stick simply to have her own way. But one of more economical habits, wishing to say later she had saved him a whole set of tires, would scream right in his ear, ‘Idiot! On the grass! The grass!’ At the very last possible second he would holler, ‘I can’t please everybody,’ fling out both fists and make earth in a shrieking, careening lurch like a chute-the-chutes hitting water. Road or grass, the women loved it. It was a kind of thrill not another pimp living could provide. Small wonder that to say ‘Finnerty swings her’ afforded a girl real distinction among the women of Perdido Street.
The mouse was one that had barely gotten away from Hallie’s lame brindle cat. The cat, that belonged to one woman who would have nothing to do with Finnerty, had been going on three legs so long that it no longer killed, it crippled. After she had crippled it, the mouse had dragged itself into a corner behind the juke. Finnerty had fished it out and given it a home in a little box with a cellophane window that had once held face powder. When he had to induct a new girl, or to straighten up an old one growing recalcitrant, he took her to watch the mouse. His own face would be expressionless as he and the girl saw it trying for freedom in spite of all pain. He said nothing while it hauled its wrecked hindquarters around and around. Just as it seemed the animal had made good its escape at last, he would plop it back in its box and say to the girl, ‘When you get as much sense as this mouse we’ll get along better, little baby,’ and close the box. It was a warning that she ought to try to do better by her little daddy, lest he had to put his mittens on.
‘Daddy dear,’ his Chicago blonde once complained, ‘take me to the hospital, I got to get a little something or other took out.’ And leaned her head on her hands.
‘I can’t afford to be carting you in and out of operating rooms twice a month,’ her pander told her, ‘every time you go you’re out of action for days. One more visit and by God you get everything took out. Make up your mind to that, Aching Choppers – I said everything. This piddling around with part of a gut at a time disgusts me.’
‘But Little Daddy, why get disgusted?’ the girl wanted to know, ‘if you went to a doctor about a little prostate trouble, say, you wouldn’t want the man to cut off your balls, would you? A woman got things she don’t want to lose neither, Little Daddy.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ her little daddy closed the discussion, ‘you can get along without all that crazy stuff.’
‘That’s no way to talk to a girl, not eve
n a pimp ought to be that hard,’ Mama scolded the pander in front of everyone. ‘The good book tells us “A woman is as a precious fruits in a garden shut up.”’
‘Shut up is correct,’ Finnerty commanded, ‘and anyone who says I ever hit any woman with anything bigger than a small housebrick is a coon-assed liar.’
He was as heavy in the shoulders and arms as a well-grown six-footer and the right arm bore a strange tattoo: A narrow cigarette whose smoke formed a burning boast: KING WEED-HEAD.
How much good this would do him in event of a pinch he never explained, and modestly disowned the implication of the tattoo. ‘It don’t really mean I’m the king of the weedheads, or course,’ he pointed out, ‘it just means that as a weedhead I’m a king.’ His distinctions were sometimes too fine to follow, and actually weren’t worth the bother of following anyhow. He’d been known to trade off a woman no older than thirty-five for a twenty dollar bill and a spring-blade knife, but explained he had reason to think she had been unfaithful to him. Faithful or not, if you threw in half a can of greenish tea with the twenty, he was ready to let loose of almost any one of his women. Except, of course, Reba, for to her Finnerty had been true: hadn’t he once been offered a cartload of green bananas plus a full can of potoguaya for her and turned the whole deal down?
But before letting that offer go he had taken a look at the tea, that had been of a light greenish cast. ‘If it had been the real boge,’ he admitted later, ‘I couldn’t have answered for my actions.’
Meaning, by boge, the deep-purple plant that only grows on Mount Popocatepetl.
He went in for broad stripes and coats almost to his knees, sometimes draped out and sometimes semi-clad – a man a full ten years ahead of his time with eyes as pale as the whiskey in his glass.
‘Oh, how I wish I could get off this killing kick,’ he’d complain. ‘Why do I do it?’
‘You might throw away that thirty-eight,’ Lucille advised him again.
‘Why, then I’d be without help,’ Finnerty told her in mild surprise. She was his housekeeper and was half-fond of him.
Yet when asked by a stranger, half-amused at the outrageous little sport in cowboy boots and smelling of cologne, ‘How tall are you, Shorty?’ Finnerty had replied, ‘About ass-high to a tall Indian. You figure you’re higher?’
The stranger answered softly, ‘I figure we’re about the same height, mister.’
‘That aint good enough.’
‘Could be you’re a little higher.’
Yet if he really liked you he’d warm right up. ‘I’ve decided not to bury you,’ he’d congratulate you then, ‘I’ve made up my mind I’m on your side against everybody. I’m not even going to drop you. It’s time I got off this killing kick and I’m going to start with you.’
Once Oliver was on your side he’d stay right at your side. He knew you needed him. And who could deny so close a friend certain small favors, such as buying him drinks all afternoon? What would be left of a friendship that couldn’t stand up under a few whiskies?
Of women he asked no favor. They had no more side for a man to be on than so many fishes in a stream. Indeed, there were so many fishes. And the bait with which he hooked them hardly varied. It was the immemorial chicken farm story procurers have used since procuring began:
‘We don’t spend our money foolish like other couples, little baby,’ the story went. ‘They won’t catch us wasting it on strong drink and folly. After all, you and I both know you’re no more a whore at heart than I’m a pimp. We’re just a lover and his little sweetheart up against it for the moment. You listen to me, little baby, and everything will be perfect. So much in the bank every week come rain or come shine. I didn’t want to tell you this, sweetheart, I wanted to save it as a surprise, but I’ve had my eye on a little chicken farm upstate for you and me for some time now. We get that for ourselves, just you and me, little baby, and in five years we’re on Easy Street. The day we move in we stop by the justice of the peace, little sweetheart. Because if you take care of me in the little things I’m going to take care of you in the big ones.’
What kind of a little sweetheart would it be who wouldn’t take care of Lover in little things till he got on his feet again?
But the weeks stretched into three and the three into a month. The months to six and a year passed by, and she took care of Lover in the little things and he took care of her in the big: he kept her out of jail or visited her there when he couldn’t. He saw that she always had enough tricks and never let them come on too strong. He saved her from drunks, thieves, pederasts and fiends, and once or twice a year took her fishing with him.
But nothing was said about chicken farming any more. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. ‘What’s the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?’ She might murmur something then about candling eggs, but he wouldn’t be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten.
In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the love long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said ‘that one there.’
Then just like an animal trained to sit up at sound of a little bell she found her way to the bed assigned her.
Where lay all she had claim to in the world: a towel, a tube of jelly, an enamel basin, a bar of Lifebuoy and a bottle of coke, half to be spilled in the basin and the other half for a douche.
Her ears heard the pants inquire her name, and her answer to that too was assigned. (‘This week you’re Pepper, little baby.’ If you let her pick her own she’d come up with something like Jane or Mary.)
So she fixed her mouth to smile in reply, washed him in water a little warm, lay down and shut her eyes; felt his hands roll her breasts and a long weight upon her, turned her head to avoid his breath, sensed some little convulsive jerk of his backside and opened her eyes: time was up again, time to begin again. By the time she returned to the light made soft beside the music that had a beat, another finger would be pointing ‘That one there.’
‘Now you finally got her where you can trust her,’ was Finnerty’s view. ‘So long as she wants to pick her own name you still aint got good conditions.’
Until a girl had relinquished every claim but those to basin, bed and towel, you couldn’t trust her. You couldn’t trust her until she had forgotten it was money she was working for. It took a man years of dedication to bring a girl to that. Only when he had madams sending him cash – no money orders – from half a dozen parts of the country might it be truly said of a man that he was a good pimp.
Finnerty’s talent lay in his limitless contempt for all things female. He treated women as though they were mindless. And in time they began to act mindlessly.
At the moment he actually had two hooked on the chicken farm story working under the same roof, and both well on their way to becoming ‘that one there.’
Frenchy and Reba worked side by side, each satisfied that it was the other whom Oliver would betray when the Judas hour struck. Meanwhile they competed, week in and week out, to show Oliver his faith wasn’t misplaced. If one week Reba was top broad, Frenchy was moping all the next, feeling so useless and so untrue that Oliver had to buck her up a bit – ‘Don’t feel so bad, honey, you done your best. That week she had was just lucky breaks. You got the looks all over her, you know that. I’m laying the odds on you this week.’
Inspired by the knowledge that her owner was still betting on her, Frenchy went all out, getting tricks to finish their business almost before they had their pants down, hustling them out the door to make room for the next, clucking at them like an enraged hen if they didn’t hurry and – lo! At the end of that week she had made
half again Reba’s take.
‘I never been so proud of anyone in my life,’ Oliver congratulated her that Saturday in front of everyone. ‘Don’t bother me, you,’ he turned on Reba – ‘buy your own drinks, bum.’ But bought Frenchy drinks all night, paraded her about, asked her what she wanted for her birthday, where she wanted to go New Year’s Night (this was July) and told her the chicken farm was now actually within reach. ‘Only two more weeks like this one, little baby, and we got it made for life.’
But for the next two weeks Reba topped the whole house, they had to hold her back from pulling tricks in off the street – and so it went, week in, week out, playing the one against the other till it was a standing joke at Dockery’s Bar to ask who was Finnerty’s top broad now.
A joke which only the two butts failed to understand.
‘You must despise women something terrible,’ Mama once grew bold enough to challenge him.
‘I believe, whatever you are, be a stompdown good one,’ was all Finnerty replied.
And no one could deny that, at his trade, Oliver was anything but a stompdown good one. In fact, he was a perfect little dilly. For he never came on cheap and loud, such as ‘Meet the Stinger from St Louis, have a piece of skin. Got six broads in Miami, six in Kansas City,’ and all of that.
Yet why should any right-minded girl ruin her health just to keep some unfinshed product in sideburns looking sharp? What right-minded girl could let any forenoon lush bounce himself off her fine pink hide to wear off his hangover before going home to his wife, in order that some Finnerty could bet the daily double? Why wind up, scarred from ankles to breast, in some panel house in Trinidad?
It was something Mama pretended not to understand, but understood better than she let on. The fact was that an unprotected girl got into all manner of mischief, such as getting drunk on the job and ripping off her joint togs and trying to catch a Greyhound for home. It took a good pimp to keep a girl honest, Mama knew.